Two Canadian high schools are recalling their yearbooks after hateful, coded messages slipped into the published pages, prompting apologies and reprints in both Halifax and Toronto. The discovery has unsettled educators and Holocaust scholars, who warn that such coded language is spreading among students and turning up where few would think to look for it.
In Halifax, a high school is recalling its yearbook over a hateful message built around a number. A Holocaust and genocide scholar explained that the figure first surfaced in the 1950s and was popularized again in the 1980s, and that it is now used online by Holocaust deniers as a kind of shorthand that many people would not immediately recognize.
The scholar said that what he heard in the message was ignorance, a lack of awareness of the harmful impact of such statements, of which perhaps the student and even the teachers were not fully aware. It pained him, he said, to see the rise and the ease with which those words are now being used.
In Toronto, another high school is recalling its yearbook over a different coded neo-Nazi message. A similar incident was also reported in Pittsburgh, an indication that the problem reaches beyond any single school or city and is part of a wider pattern that educators are only beginning to grapple with.
Experts say the timing is not an accident. Holocaust denialism spiked online during the pandemic and again after the October 7 attacks, feeding a climate in which such references circulate more freely than they once did. The content turning up in the yearbooks, they say, is being drawn from internet memes that have gone viral and become increasingly common over the last few years.
Part of what makes the messages so hard to catch is that they are meant to pass unnoticed. Students, experts say, are likely hoping the phrases are so obscure that they will fly under the radar for most readers, tucked in plain sight among ordinary yearbook pages. That, they warn, is part of why such coded language can spread among students without anyone immediately realizing what it means.
In both Halifax and Toronto, the yearbooks are being recalled and reprinted at the schools' expense. Principals have apologized for what happened, but neither school has offered an explanation of how the phrases made it through the editing and printing process undetected, leaving open questions about how the material was missed.